Introduction
Over the past fifty years, in my own organization, Inverness Research, I have evaluated and studied hundreds of efforts to improve education. For almost a decade, I have worked with Ten Strands as a critical friend and thought partner. Because with Ten Strands I am both an insider and an outsider, I have a unique position to reflect upon the work of Ten Strands as well as the fundamental question of why it is important.
First, with some humility I want to offer my own articulation of the purpose and work of Ten Strands.
Ten Strands is working to build the propensity and capacity of our society to better prepare the next generation for the world it will inherit.
This is perhaps a broader conceptualization of the work of Ten Strands than I think they have themselves. This is an idea that needs some unpacking, so let me start by telling a story and sharing a realization.
I live on the coast of California, near the Point Reyes National Seashore, and in February of last year there was an abnormally violent storm with wind gusts of sixty miles per hour that brought down a large redwood tree onto two cars parked in my driveway. I was shaken but grateful to be alive. I was also grateful for the generosity of my neighbor who allowed me to borrow her car for the next two weeks as I sorted things out.
When the time came to return the borrowed car, I made sure to wash it, clean it out, and return it with a full gas tank. I remembered hearing my father’s voice telling me to always return something you borrowed in better shape than when you got it.
And now, thinking about the redwood, the smashed cars, the storm, and the reality of climate change, I come back to the borrowed car. I realize that my generation of baby boomers has been the de facto stewards of this estate. We have essentially “borrowed” and used the planet for our own purposes for the past fifty years. And now it is time for us to return what we borrowed—and turn it over to the next generation.
And yet—unlike the car I had borrowed, refueled, washed, and cleaned—we are now returning the planet in a more depleted condition than when we first assumed our stewardship. Fifty years of population growth, industrial expansion, carbon burning, and general lack of care has initiated a process of climate change that is generating a multitude of physical, economic, and social crises.
Our generation certainly has a moral responsibility—as well as the highest levels of self-interest—to do the best we can to stop the growth of greenhouse gasses and to mitigate the effects of climate change. But no matter how well we do that, we will nonetheless be turning over the planet to the next generation with irreparable damage done and in a state of accelerating decline.
So what else can my generation do?
I think our generation owes it to the next generation to offer them learning opportunities that will prepare them to address the inevitable future challenges they will face because of a changing climate. If we cannot return the earth to them in good shape, we can at least give them a powerful education so that they can survive—and do better than we have done—when it is their turn to assume stewardship of the planet.
The formal and informal education we provide our youth should be designed to prepare them for the world they will encounter as they enter adulthood. Educators must anticipate what is coming and not be guided only by what they know from the past. In a world with uncertain future challenges, we need to provide our youth with skills and attitudes that will make them flexible and able to adapt.
We want education to prepare us for the future as well as the present. This is why, for example, we have emphasized the importance of teaching our children how to read and write. We know these are foundational and powerful skills that allow us to continue to learn and to adjust to an evolving world. Language literacy has been a foundational tool for future adaptation. From this time forward in history—for both our individual and collective survival—environmental literacy will be as important as language literacy. The physical environment we live in is changing more rapidly than at any time in history. There are more extreme weather patterns with greater variation and less certainty. Sea levels will rise, wildfires will increase, and our cars will continue to be crushed by trees falling in violent storms.
Concomitant with these physical climate changes are massive social and political changes. Already climate change is contributing to political instability, mass migration, and increasing disparities in wealth. For all these reasons climate change will provide enormous challenges for the next generation.
And yet we are slow to respond. There are many forms of inertia in the system that provide barriers to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and there are also many factors that cause a long lag time in the response of the educational system. The gap between what is actually happening and what needs to happen is great and presents us with an existential threat. We need to find ways to accelerate our response.
And it is important to note that we will not successfully address the challenges of climate change without a strong educational component to our effort. We certainly must do more to reduce greenhouse gasses, but we also must make it a priority to develop a deep environmental literacy in our population. The pandemic and our experience with vaccinations provides a good example of what happens when science outpaces public understanding.
It is most important to understand that we will not be able to address climate change without an equal emphasis on climate change education.
In California and across the United States, we do not invest nearly the same level of resources in developing public understanding as we do in our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change. We are investing relatively little in making our schools and teachers more capable of teaching about climate change. Too often the push for environmental literacy is seen more as the goal of an educational special interest group rather than a raison d’etre for education—more of a sidelight than an overarching purpose.
We very much need the next generation to be smarter and wiser than mine. This is not just my generation’s idea of what is good for our youth. They are already demanding of us that we do better-in terms of mitigation, adaptation and education. Can we “look them in the eye” and say to them that we are doing everything we can to prepare them for what is coming?
If we are, in fact, to accelerate the response of our educational systems to climate change, we will need help from outside those systems. We will need philanthropy, universities, NGOs, government agencies, and intermediate organizations (ref) to partner in the work. We will need leadership to assemble the expertise, create the designs, and generate the motivation for achieving widespread environmental literacy. This is the role of Ten Strands.
Ten Strands will not itself create environmental literacy; rather it will initiate support and add value to many other educational efforts. Ten Strands is working upstream to develop the capacities that are required to generate downstream environmental literacy.
We are at a critical turning point in the planet’s history. We cannot entirely prevent climate change. The future world will be different from ours today. There will be many challenges. But as a first step, to accelerate our response to those challenges, we can work with Ten Strands to help them build the propensity and capacity of our society to prepare the next generation for the world they will inherit.
